1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a user interface apparatus and method, and more particularly, to a user interface apparatus and method for recognizing hand movements.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computer system hardware continues to rapidly develop, artificial vision fields created by these computer system are increasingly applied to applications, such as, for example, image recognition, pattern recognition, and gesture recognition.
The field of gesture recognition has been used to deliver commands to machines via human intuitional behaviors.
The gesture recognition field has become one of the leading innovative technologies for games and Television (TV) remote controls through the use of artificial vision technology.
Similarly, in the field of sensors, hand position, pose and movement has been recognized using auxiliary equipment, such as, for example, an accelerometer, a gyro, and a haptic sensor.
The gesture recognition field using sensor technology has been applied to the field of precise control, which includes games, by processing information that is more precise and simple than the signals of an artificial vision system. The processed information is also used to create a movement database for a human being.
As described above, gesture recognition includes sensor-based methods and artificial vision-based methods.
The sensor-based methods recognize a gesture by precisely and quickly processing various human movements, which have a high degree of freedom, by directly acquiring speeds and positions of finger joints and hands as 3-dimensional spatial data.
The artificial vision-based methods detect a hand without a special tool by preserving presence/absence and position information of the hand, and detecting the hand by a skin color.
However, the sensor-based method of recognizing a gesture requires that sensors be attached and retained on a part of a human body. Further, it difficult to add new technology to a control system that includes the sensors of this method.
The artificial vision-based method of recognizing a gesture requires a significant amount of computation for hand detection, and also results in a high error rate when detecting a hand by identifying a skin color.